


Normalization

by osprey_archer



Series: Reciprocity [20]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-03-24
Packaged: 2018-03-19 10:17:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3606471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky find a new apartment, eat s'mores, and talk about the Soviet Union and Pierce and SHIELD.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Normalization

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [littlerhymes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/littlerhymes) for betaing this!

Steve fell in love with the fourth apartment that they visited. The landlady opened the door, and Steve took three steps inside and stopped, turning around to take the place in. It was mostly one big room, with a high white-painted ceiling and blond hardwood floors and big windows that let in great splashes of late-afternoon light: airy and empty and bright, and just walking inside made him feel at peace. 

He looked over the rest of it, of course. The kitchen occupied the left corner of the big room: plenty of cabinets, plenty of counter space. The two bedrooms were a little smaller than he would have liked, but the bathroom was surprisingly spacious, with a bathtub rather than just a shower. 

Bucky promptly climbed in the bathtub to check out the size. He hung his feet over the side of the tub, swinging them a little in the air, and grinned at Steve. 

“Tebe nravitsa?” Steve asked. _Do you like it_? He’d started taking a Russian course. He’d been a little worried how Bucky would react, but every time they talked on the comscreen Bucky pestered Steve to share his newest vocabulary and grinned like a lunatic at whatever Steve said. 

He claimed it was because Steve’s accent was hilarious. But when Steve jokingly suggested he should stop studying it, Bucky insisted, “No, no, don’t stop. You’re doing great.”

Bucky was grinning now. “Da,” he said, and propelled himself out of the tub. Then he arranged his face into a more sober, slightly worried expression, and went to speak to the landlady. “How do you feel about dogs?” 

Steve had been looking out the high bathroom window. It had a view of the park across the street, the leaves barely tinted with yellow and red. “I don’t have a dog,” he called. 

“You should get one!” Bucky called back. 

Steve sighed. He wasn’t sure why Bucky had latched onto the idea that Steve should get a pet, especially given that when he wasn’t discussing Steve’s hypothetical dog, he often talked as if he expected Steve to be back on the Bus, if not any day, then certainly in a few weeks. In time for Christmas, at the very least. “They’re going back to the Lodge this year,” Bucky had told him. “You _liked_ the Lodge.”

Maybe if Steve had a dog tying him down, it would be easier for Bucky to accept that Steve wasn’t coming back. 

It probably wouldn’t be fair to the dog to get it for that reason, though. 

They signed the lease that afternoon. The landlady handed over the keys, and when she left, Bucky said, “Steve. Steve.” He was practically vibrating. “Let’s stay here tonight.”

_Yes,_ Steve thought. They’d been staying in the old apartment again – Steve couldn’t find a subletter for the last two months of the lease and he couldn’t justify living somewhere else when he was already paying rent on one place. But goddamn, he’d be glad to see the back of it. 

But. “There won’t be electricity till we call the utility company tomorrow,” Steve pointed out.

“So? There’s running water. That’s all we really need. C’mon, it’ll be like we were kids again and my dad forgot to mail in the electric bill.” Steve was never sure if Bucky’s dad was actually that forgetful, or if Bucky just said that to save face about falling short that month. It happened to most everyone in the thirties at least once. “We can get candles. We can roast marshmallows on the candle flames. C’mon, Steve!” 

Steve laughed. “Okay,” he said. 

They stopped by their old apartment to pick up blankets and sleeping bags and most of their non-perishable food. Steve grabbed the fondue pot Peggy had given him, too: a little inside joke when he first arrived in the twenty-first century. The toasting forks would be useful for marshmallows. 

For the marshmallows, however, they had to go to the store, and Steve grabbed graham crackers and chocolate bars as well. “You’ve never had a s’more?” Steve asked, pretending to be shocked, although he hadn’t either till the cookouts last summer at the VA. 

Bucky shoved him on the shoulder, then went still with surprise and embarrassment. 

“It didn’t even hurt,” Steve said, and gave Bucky’s shoulder a gentle shove in return. Bucky rocked like Steve had knocked him off balance, and didn’t seem quite sure how to react, so Steve went on to the next aisle. 

Bucky caught up with him there, and nudged Steve lightly with his elbow. Bucky was looking at him quizzically: _Did I do that okay?_

Steve grinned at Bucky, and the quizzical look turned into a smile. Steve put an arm around Bucky’s shoulder, squeezing a little, only a little unnerved by the feeling of metal through Bucky’s leather jacket. It was still gentler than he would have done when they were with the Howling Commandos, but getting there. “How do you feel about scented candles?” Steve asked. 

“Hate ‘em.”

“I do too.” Supervision, superhearing, supersmelling. Steve found most artificially scented products unbearable. 

“Do they have beeswax?” Bucky asked. He dropped to a crouch, scanning the lower shelves. He grinned up at Steve. “My mom used to burn beeswax.” He breathed in, like he was remembering the smell, and started coughing on the chemical stench of the candles in the aisle. 

They found beeswax candles eventually, and Steve ended up setting up half a dozen of them on a plate in the middle of the floor: a tall pillar candle and a squat cylinder candle with three wicks and a few votive candles. They set up the sleeping bags and blankets next to it, as if the candles were a campfire, and Steve lit the candles, one by one. 

“I used to be able to light fires with one of my fingers,” Bucky said. He held up his left hand, the metal invisible under the glove. “Short circuit in the ring finger. Always lit everyone’s cigarettes.” Bucky smiled a little. He glanced at Steve, who attempted to look encouraging, although he wondered where Bucky was going with this. “God, it stank. That was right after the war, the Soviet military didn’t have two flakes of real tobacco to rub together just then.”

“Not even for the Winter Soldier and his company?” 

“Oh, I wasn’t the Winter Soldier yet. Or rather I was, but the Winter Soldier wasn’t anything special yet. I was still in training: that was why I was in the Ukraine. They had a brigand problem after the war, partisans who wouldn’t lay down their arms after the Nazis left…” He trailed off. “Where did you put the marshmallows, Steve?”

Steve found the bag among the pile of blankets on the floor. Bucky put two on toasting forks, one for him and one for Steve, and balanced his on the edge of a candle so he could turn it to brown evenly. “Later on, though, of course everyone in the program got Cuban cigars. Access to foreign food stores where there weren’t even lines – not that I ever went to one; they weren’t going to waste my time with shopping. Crimean vacations, although I never went on one of those either. Bolshoi tickets. Stalin lent Grisha and me his own box, that time we went to Moscow, and the ballerinas were just…” He sighed, remembering.

Bucky paused. He had stopped turning his marshmallow, so one side had gotten very brown while the other remained white. He rolled it part way over. “I’m trying to imagine the president lending me his theater box,” Steve admitted, to break the silence. 

“I bet he would’ve,” said Bucky. “If you’d made it back to the states during the war.” He poked Steve in the side. “Groom you to run for Senate, maybe. President Cap, wouldn’t that be a thing?” 

“Too much paperwork,” said Steve.

Bucky laughed. He stuck his marshmallow into the flame so it caught fire. He watched it burn for a few seconds, then blew it out and started assembling the ingredients for a s’more. “We used to keep a cut-glass bowl of caviar in the dacha – Andrushka said the bowl came from one of the tsar’s palaces, but I think he was lying; he always talked big. But we just kept it sitting out, just for zakuski, in case we got hungry.” 

He mushed the marshmallow between the graham crackers and chocolate, the white insides of the marshmallow oozing out from among the blackened outside. He ate the s’more and smiled at Steve. “And of course I’m always hungry,” he said, and licked the sticky melted marshmallow off his fingers. 

Steve held out the marshmallow bag, and Bucky took another and stuck it on the fondue fork. “Do you miss it?” Steve asked, and wondered how it had never occurred to him to ask that before. 

Bucky kept his eyes on the candles. “It’s impossible to find good caviar in the US.”

“No, I meant – Russia. The Soviet Union, I guess,” Steve said awkwardly. 

Bucky grew quiet, introspective. His marshmallow caught fire, and although he appeared to be staring right at it, he didn’t seem to notice till it melted off his toasting fork and snuffed one of the votive candles. The sudden drop in light seemed to rouse him, and he blinked at the smoldering sugary heap. “I miss the people,” he said. “Not Andrushka, not the later ones. But Grisha, and Vovka and Roman and – maybe not Petya. He was fucking nuts. Couldn’t sleep without drinking himself into a stupor. But the others. Marusya, Agnessa…” 

He paused, searching Steve’s face. He must have found whatever he was looking for, because he said all in a rush, “I wish you could’ve met them, Steve, I wish you could’ve met all of them. You would have liked them, you would have loved Agnessa.” 

“Agnessa?” This was a new name. “Was she your girl?”

Bucky shook his head. “Not like that. Some German soldiers, they…” A pause. “Hurt her. So not like that. But she had the most beautiful eyes, such beautiful hair, even when it was dirty – we were always filthy, all of us. She rode a horse like you wouldn’t believe.” Another smile. “We looked after each other. All of us. Like good comrades.”

“Maybe I could meet them,” Steve said, and couldn’t believe he was saying that. “Maybe we could visit them?” 

But Bucky was shaking his head. “No, no, no. No. They’re dead.” 

“Maybe most of them. But one or two might still be – ”

“No,” said Bucky. His voice had gone flat. “They all died a very long time ago.” 

“Oh.” Steve hesitated, but he might as well ask: “Do you want to talk about – ”

“ _No_ ,” said Bucky, and his voice sounded clogged and choked.

Steve stretched out to grab a water bottle from one of their grocery bags. He twisted the top off and handed it to Bucky. Bucky drank three quarters of it in a gulp, and gasped, and rested his head on the pillow and stared into the candle flames. 

Steve made him a s’more as an entirely inadequate apology. He held it out to Bucky, but Bucky didn’t even turn his head. “Bucky? _Bucky_ – ”

He touched Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky didn’t even blink. 

Oh. It had been months since Steve had seen Bucky go away in his head like this. He’d forgotten how unnerving it was, and he almost called Bucky back; but he remembered Bucky’s sharp question the last time he had done so. _Do you actually need me for something, or did you just do that ‘cause you’re an asshole?_

Steve ate the s’more. No use letting it get cold. Then he rolled over onto his back, so it wouldn’t be so easy to look at Bucky, and tried to think about something else. 

The empty apartment around him provided a nice distraction. Now that they’d found the place, he wanted to get as much furniture shopping done as possible before Bucky went back to the Bus. Assuming Bucky didn’t balk at buying furniture the way he’d balked at doing anything to personalize his room in their old apartment. 

Bucky had finally started to take a little care with his clothes, though, so maybe that was a good sign for the furniture. There was the jeans jacket he’d worn to Florence, the black leather jacket he wore today, a dark gray pea coat. Not a lot of clothes, but still an improvement over a wardrobe composed mostly of ratty oversized sweatshirts. The sweatshirts seemed to have been relegated to sleepwear – 

Steve made the mistake of glancing over at Bucky. Bucky still stared unseeing into the fire. 

Steve swallowed and closed his eyes and twisted his head away. He felt terribly uncomfortable leaving Bucky like that. 

They didn’t need a lot of furniture to start out with, anyway. A kitchen table and chairs and a sofa for the living room, and the rest could wait until Bucky visited again. 

Well. Comfortable as the floor was, probably they ought to invest in beds, too. 

Bucky’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Natasha said you’d been to Vermont. To see Dum Dum.”

Steve exhaled slowly in relief. “Yeah, I was. He doesn’t walk very well now, but mentally he’s still all there.” After Bucky’s freak out the one time they visited Peggy, Steve figured he should establish that right up front. 

Bucky assembled another s’more. “Do you think he’d want to see me?” 

“Yes,” said Steve. “I think he’d be a little surprised at first, but he’d want to see you.” 

Bucky was silent. He poked at a peak in the candle wax with his fondue fork.

“And Vermont’s beautiful in the fall,” Steve added. 

Bucky continued prodding the candle, a frown gathering between his brows, biting his lower lip. It was an effort not to continue trying to convince him, but Steve stopped himself. That look didn’t mean rejection, not yet; it meant he was struggling to decide what to do, and trying to hurry it along would only push him to say no. 

Suddenly the tension relaxed out of Bucky’s jaw. He propped his chin on his hand, half-hiding his smile behind his fingers. “We should take him a bottle of bourbon.” 

They chatted about that for a while: what kind of bourbon to buy, whether to take Steve’s motorcycle or rent a car, which route to take. Interstates or back roads? Interstates were quicker, of course, but back roads offered more possibilities for adventure. 

It was going so well that Steve said carelessly, “New York’s on the way. Do you want to think about seeing Rebecca, too?” 

Instantly all the tension came back into Bucky’s shoulders. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded. 

“If you’re willing to see Dum Dum, I don’t know why you won’t at least talk about maybe visiting Rebecca or Dolly.” 

“It’s not the same at all!” 

“Why not?” 

“Because!”

Steve nearly snapped, _Because what?_ But that wouldn’t help at all. He stuck another marshmallow on his fork and set it to toast over the candle, and when he had calmed down a little, he said, “I don’t understand. Could you please explain what you’re thinking?” 

“Didn’t you listen to anything on the Bus?” Bucky snapped. “About that Hydra chief they fought right after the Triskelion collapsed? He had a bunch of supersoldiers of his own. Not very super. But I guess he did the best he could.” His anger had chilled into professional disdain. “He controlled them by keeping their families hostage.” 

“Oh.” Steve got it. 

The anger seemed to drain out of Bucky suddenly. He stared into the candle flame. “It’s a good strategy. Someone else’ll pick it up. So even after my sisters die, there’s nieces and nephews and grandnieces and – ” 

Bucky stopped himself. 

Steve considered his words carefully before he continued. “But Buck, they could kidnap your nieces and nephews even if you never visit your family,” he said. 

A shake of Bucky’s head. “If they know who I am.”

“And you think they don’t?”

“Sasha probably did. He always knew everything. But I bet he never told anyone.” 

“Really?” Steve was doubtful. 

Bucky rolled his head to the side to look at Steve. “I think you seriously underestimate how much Sasha loved keeping secrets and lying,” Bucky said. He started laughing. “I’ve got a funny story about that.” 

“Is it actually funny?” Steve asked warily.

“Yes, it’s hilarious.” Bucky sounded annoyed. “So one time after I woke up, right, I asked him what my name was – I always asked him that, the first few times, till eventually it sunk into my thick head that it was really better not to – and he sort of gasped and got tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘You don’t remember?’ So I thought real hard and I said, ‘Soldat,’ and he practically fell out of the chair and cried, ‘Damn them! The brainwashing went that deep!’” 

Bucky dissolved into giggles. Steve stared at him. 

Bucky brought his laughter under control with a few gasps. “Come on, that’s hilarious,” he said. 

“It’s _awful_ ,” Steve protested. “You know that’s awful, right?” 

“Yeah, but it’s _funny_ ,” Bucky said. “It’s so ironic, ‘cause – well, you know why it’s ironic. So he told me my name was Brad and spun out this whole story about how I’d been kidnapped and brainwashed by Chechen terrorists or something like that. But _later_ , after the mission, Sasha must have forgotten everything he said, because he called me _Ben_ – ” Bucky began to laugh again, and Steve started to laugh too, uneasily, because he wasn’t sure what to do.

“Told you it was funny,” Bucky said triumphantly.

“And awful,” said Steve, gasping it out between laughs.

“It’s both. And I was like, ‘I thought you said my name was Brad?’ – Sasha didn’t even miss a beat, he just went all sad – the man did an amazing sad; did you see any of the speeches they replayed in the weeks after the Triskelion fell? I loved that shit, all the anchors falling all over themselves to prove he’d never really fooled them, when you know he had them eating right out of his hand.” 

“I remember,” Steve said. By the time he’d gotten out of the hospital, the first shock had faded, and everyone was rushing to reassure themselves that they had, somehow, known there was something off about Pierce all along. They had handed him the reins of almost unlimited power, but still, there had always been this feeling… 

Not many people were honest enough to admit they’d never noticed anything off at all. 

“The man was a _virtuoso_ ,” Bucky said, and the admiration in his voice pained Steve. “You’d have thought my amnesia was the tragedy of his life, he looked so sad about it. Like he was trying not to show how sad he was, because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but there was just so much that some of it welled up anyway. He patted my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t try to remember, Ben. The doctors say it will damage what’s left of your brain functioning.’”

Steve couldn’t help it. He started laughing too. “Fuck, that’s _awful_ ,” he gasped.

“I _know_ ,” Bucky cackled, and laughed so hard he had to gasp for breath. “Oh, fuck,” he said, and rolled over onto his back. He cast his flesh arm behind his head, staring up at the ceiling, and when he was calm again he said, “We should put glow-in-the-dark stars up there. Like Simmons has.”

Steve rolled over on his back too, considering the ceiling. “You could put them in your room,” he suggested. Glow-in-the-dark stars would look a little tacky on the vaulted living room ceiling, he thought, but the bedroom ceilings were lower. 

“Mmm,” said Bucky. He rolled back on his stomach, and Steve couldn’t tell if he was considering it or negating the possibility. 

The headlights from the occasional passing car reflected on the ceiling, dim and ghostly in the dark; but mostly the night seemed quiet and soft. Perhaps a little cold, but they had plenty of blankets to keep warm. 

Steve thought Bucky had probably fallen asleep, but then Bucky said, “I was always so surprised when he hit me.” 

Steve looked over at him. Bucky turned his head too and smiled at Steve, and it was the same rueful smile Bucky used to get when someone bested him in a back alley fight. _Well, maybe he won that round, but I’ll get him next time. And he’ll wear that shiner for a week._

And why not? Alexander Pierce might have won a few rounds, but Bucky was alive and smiling, while Pierce had died in the smoking ruins of his dreams. 

On impulse, Steve reached out and stroked his hand over Bucky’s hair. He half-expected Bucky to shy away, but Bucky smiled at Steve and snuggled his head down in the crook of his own arm, so his sweatshirt half-hid his face. Steve had to smile back. 

“Are you sorry you never got the chance to hit him?” Steve asked. 

It wasn’t a very tactful question, but it didn’t seem to upset Bucky. “Nah. It was better for everyone that he died when he did.” His smile took on a hint of wryness. “Assuming Hydra doesn’t have him in a cryo vault somewhere, waiting for medicine to improve enough to heal his wounds.”

Steve made a face. “I hope not,” he said. 

“It would be poetic justice. Sasha in cryo,” Bucky said. “But probably he wouldn’t care about waking up, and everyone he loves is gone. So maybe not.”

Steve stopped stroking Bucky’s hair, although he let his hand rest on the back of Bucky’s neck. Bucky’s mouth worked, and suddenly he was talking again. “He’d just make shit up. Like, once he told me I’d been on a mission to Mars, and the lack of oxygen damaged my brain after I fucked up the spaceship on the way back – he didn’t quite say this, it was always just implied, I fucked everything up and got everyone killed – ” Bucky pressed his balled-up fist against his mouth, like he was trying shut himself up. “I can’t believe you’re giving up on fighting Hydra.”

It hit Steve like a punch. “That’s a low blow,” Steve protested, and suddenly he felt furious. “You want to talk about the past, that’s fine, Buck, but you don’t get to use it to make me do what you want now.” 

“I’m not,” Bucky said, and now he was angry too. They were both sitting up, glaring at each other. “But you _are_ giving up, it was just supposed to be sick leave and now you’re not coming back and I don’t see why, Steve, you’re fine now, you can see that, can’t you? I think,” he said, and his voice had taken on a faintly taunting tone, like a boy getting ready to issue a double-dog-dare, “you’re just – ”

“What?” Steve said, when Bucky left the sentence hanging. “What do you think?” 

Bucky pressed his lips together. He pulled one of the blankets around his shoulders. “We’d get to fight together again,” he said. “And you’d get to know everyone this time, Steve, it’d be like the Howling Commandos. You were so happy with the Commandos – I think it’s the happiest I’ve ever seen you. If you’d just come back…”

“I’m never going back to SHIELD.”

A horrible slapped-puppy look came over Bucky’s face. It was gone in an instant, and Bucky snapped, “Why the fuck not?” 

“If it was just the chance to fight beside you, you know I’d be there in a heartbeat,” Steve said. “But not for SHIELD. I don’t believe in most of what they do.”

“You don’t believe in protecting people?” Bucky scoffed. “Tell me another.” 

“I don’t believe that their methods are actually very good at protecting people. As long as they’re completely without oversight, it’s going to be too easy for them to decide that whatever they want to do is what needs to be done. I can’t be a part of that. I can’t let that happen.”

Bucky tipped his head back. “You want to fight SHIELD,” he said, and groaned. “Of course you want to fucking fight SHIELD. You always found the three hundred pound gorilla in the room and got into a fistfight with him. Why can’t you pick on someone your own size just once in your life? You got something against winning?” 

“No,” said Steve. “If there had been more guys my own size I’d have been happy to fight them. Wasn’t my fault everyone was bigger than me.” 

“Are you just bored?” Bucky asked. “’Cause if you need something to do, I can be awful again. No problem. You won’t have any time to think about any of this anymore, I’ll be so bad. Anything to keep you out of trouble.”

“Please don’t,” Steve said. 

“I want more marshmallows,” said Bucky, his face drooping into a sulk. “And I’m thirsty.” 

“Bucky! Hold your horses.”

“And a horse,” said Bucky, his face lighting up like this idea had never occurred to him before. “I want a horse too. Let’s steal one.” 

“ _Bucky_!” Steve couldn’t help laughing, although it was probably a bad idea. “I have a plan. Well, I have a possible strategy. Will you at least listen to that before you go off the deep end?” 

Bucky threw his hands up, as if to say _fine_ , and settled back with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Coulson’s never going to put SHIELD under any kind of oversight for moral reasons. But he might do it because he loves his team.”

Bucky tipped his head sideways.

“He’d hate to see any of them in jail,” Steve said. “And he knows that might happen as long as SHIELD’s still technically a terrorist organization.” 

“They’re not going to put any of us in prison,” Bucky murmured. It wasn’t quite disagreement. He was quoting Natasha’s words at the Senate hearings. “They need us.” 

“Sure. That’s protected us all so far. But that’s a flimsy protection – ”

“That’s the only protection anyone ever has,” Bucky responded. His voice was flat. 

Steve stopped, hesitating, uncertain how to go on. “Still. The danger might motivate Coulson to normalize the situation if he gets the chance.”

Bucky considered, then gave a slow nod. “That’s actually not terrible,” he said grudgingly, and squinted at Steve. “You’re not leaving anything out, are you? Plans to grapple with Coulson on the ledge of Stark Tower or something like that?” 

“No plans to punch anyone,” Steve said, and paused, because he had not yet unfolded his entire plan. “The main problem is that Coulson already knows all that. But he also knows that normalizing SHIELD’s situation will limit his freedom to maneuver, and I think that’s why he hasn’t responded to attempts to legalize SHIELD.” Both Tony’s friend Colonel Rhodes and Coulson’s ally General Talbot had made some attempts to remedy SHIELD’s outlaw status. 

Bucky nodded, even more slowly. 

“So I have to do something to make the threat of prosecution seem immediate –”

“No,” said Bucky. 

“You haven’t even – ”

“You want to offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb. No no no no no,” Bucky said, and banged his fist against the hardwood floor. “No! And _don’t_ promise me that you don’t intend to actually go to prison, because once you get that ball rolling you won’t be able to stop it. Unless you’re planning to go on the run if they convict you? The only SHIELD member anyone respects anymore, a fugitive from justice! _That_ will make people eager to legalize SHIELD!” 

Steve almost started shouting back. He took a deep breath instead, and let it out, and thought about it. “Okay,” he said. “You have a point. It’s still in the draft stages, anyway.” He steepled his hands and leaned his mouth against them, thinking. “I don’t think I am the only SHIELD member people respect, though,” he said. “I’ve been reading the papers these last few months – and blogs, too – and Coulson’s done a good job positioning SHIELD as Robin Hood.” 

Coulson was not a charismatic figure the way Alexander Pierce had been; the newspapers barely knew his name. But SHIELD as an embattled underdog charmed the public in a way SHIELD as a looming monolith never had. 

“Of course,” said Steve, thinking out loud, “Robin Hood could only remain an outlaw till King Richard came home. What we’d need to do…” He paused, assembling his thoughts. “We’d need to maneuver Coulson into a position where he’d have to refuse – publicly refuse, not just fob Talbot off in private – to legalize SHIELD’s position. He can’t say no and maintain the moral high ground. Or, well. He probably thinks his moral high ground is unimpeachable. But he has to know he won’t be able to maintain the _appearance_ of the moral high ground.”

Steve paused, just in case another idea came to him, but the flow seemed to have stopped for the moment. He looked at Bucky. “You like that better?” he asked.

Bucky didn’t answer for a while. He lay back down, squirming back into his sleeping bag. “Why do you have to go tilting after windmills?” he asked. He stared into the candles as he spoke. The votive lights had all burnt out. The wicks in the squat candle had hollowed out a crater on the candle top, so their flames were no longer visible. Only the pillar candle continued to flicker. “Why isn’t fighting Hydra enough? Why can’t you just fight evil and be happy?” 

There was something close to despair in Bucky’s voice, and it made Steve feel tongue-tied. “I want to fight for something good,” he answered at last. 

“That doesn’t exist, Steve.” 

“You don’t – do you really believe that?” 

“Yes.” 

“Oh, Bucky – ”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Bucky said, and Steve stopped mid-reach, his hand hovering awkwardly above Bucky’s shoulder. 

Steve settled down in his own sleeping bag instead, so at least they were on the same physical level. “You don’t think my plan will work,” he said. 

“It’s not going to change anything if it does. Democratic oversight, how much has that restrained the CIA? The NSA, the FBI? MI6?”

“They haven’t yet started arresting the neighbors in the night like the Gestapo,” Steve replied. “So that’s something.”

Bucky licked his fingertips and pinched out the candle flames. A streetlamp at the corner cast a little light into the room, but otherwise it was dark. Perhaps glow-in-the-dark stars would be nice after all. 

“Look,” said Steve. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the best I can hope for is to make the world a little less bad.” He stopped, watching the headlights of a car drift across the ceiling. “I’m still going to try to do that.” 

Bucky didn’t reply at once, and Steve thought perhaps he was asleep – or pretending to be. But then there was a rustling of blankets, and the shadowy lump that was Bucky moving, and Steve felt Bucky’s hand on his shoulder. He put his own over it, holding it there. “I miss you,” Bucky said. His voice trembled, and Steve bent his head to kiss Bucky’s hand. 

“I’m right here,” Steve said. “I’ll always be right here.”


End file.
